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If you didn't go to CHI 97, here's what you missed: an opportunity
to meet interesting people, eat good food, relax, do a little
badge-scanning, and, most importantly, recharge yourself with new ideas
and enthusiasm. Of course, if you are already charged up, it's a chance
to spread good cheer among your peers.

Everyone says that meeting people is the main purpose of a
conference, but this is the first CHI that this has actually worked for
me. After three previous CHIs, in which I religiously attended every
session, but searched vainly for lunch partners (Philips, where were
your hot badges then?), I finally reached conference nirvana. This
could have had something to do with being, for the first time, with
close colleagues on the trip, or because for the first time I actually
participated in a few sessions, or because I was sniffing around for
job opportunities. The downside of this, though, is that I was somewhat
preoccupied, and so will make a poor tour guide of the sessions. To
make matters worse, the few notes I did take are hopelessly lost in the
confusion that is my imminent move from Pittsburgh to Chicago.

A more difficult problem is knowing what to report. The VID
community itself is quite diverse; some of us are interested in
practical results to guide detailed visual design of HCI systems; some
of us are interested in design process; some in interaction paradigms
and user experience, and some in the `fuzzy front end' of user needs
and invention. People have different strategies at conferences, too.
Some might stick to sessions that closely match their interests or
current projects; some colleagues of mine make a point to see only new
technologies, some like to go to the more ephemeral sessions such as
demos and panels because they are experiences which cannot be captured
in a paper. With this difficulty in mind, I will make brief mention of
a few general sessions, and finish up with some thoughts about the
place of VID in future CHI conferences. I hope that in next year's CHI
column we can get more voices helping us report on the conference;
there is simply too much of value to be captured by one person.

The conference began rather engagingly with the opening plenary
by Rick Prelinger, who was also at the Doors of Perception conference
last year. Rick's presentation, Utopia Appropriated: The Future as it Was,
looked at how corporations presented their visions of a utopian future
filled with useful technology. Rick told his story mainly through the
use of industrial and advertising film clips created between 1936 and
1965 by corporations such as GM, Chevrolet, and Whirlpool. The films
told marvelous tales of speedy and efficient intelligent highways, and
could be rather amusing because of their stereotypes and because we
know now how things really turned out (such is the pleasure of
reviewing former future predictions). It was more remarkable, however,
for putting into historical perspective our long-running idea that
technology and product design are a means to improving life, still very
much with us today, and because it allows us to step back from our
current work and try to imagine what we will sound like to conference
goers in the year 2040 looking back on today. How will audiences react
to our proclamations of the global information society or Sun's
Starfire concept film? Rick's presentation made an interesting backdrop
to view Philips' presentation on Wednesday of their Vision of the Future
project, whose output, like those before it, were high concept films.
Much has already been written about the Philips project, so I won't go
into it here.

This year, three special interest group sessions were devoted
to visual interaction design. On Wednesday morning, there was
`Designing the Quality Experience,' which featured presentations by Jim
Faris of Alben + Faris, Jodi Forlizzi of Carnegie Mellon University
(now of Digital Inks), Gitta Salomon of Swim Studio, and Dan Boyarski
of Carnegie Mellon University. The presenters and audience explored the
question of how we can design systems that afford satisfying and rich
user experiences. A more detailed account will hopefully appear in the
next issue of the Bulletin. On Wednesday afternoon, Loretta Staples
hosted a VID session comprised of number of presentations ranging from
web design and the use of grids, to metaphors and affordances and
understanding how to talk about the role of movement in interaction
design. Finally, on Thursday, graduate students from the Royal College
of Art's Computer-Related Design program and Carnegie Mellon
University's Interaction Design program demonstrated course work and
thesis projects. The room was packed, and attended by some notable
`celebs' of the HCI world, which was very satisfying to see.

There were a number of interesting late-breaking demos, as
well; for example, Steve Mann, of the Media Lab, gave a controversial
presentation on the evolution of his wearable computer/personal imaging
system, which he uses, at least as one application, to create `personal
documentaries'. In one documentary, he approaches workers in various
businesses to ask them about the surveillance cameras in the store, and
how they feel about being filmed without their permission, all the
while filming the worker with a hidden camera built into his
eyeglasses. He then pulls out a hand-held camera and begins filming the
worker, capturing their reactions in both cameras. Ethical
considerations aside (it strikes me as a crueler Candid Camera), his
work points out how little we think about technology in our environment
and the privacy and security issues that face us. Another paper, by
Anthony Dunne and William Gaver from RCA, had a similar theme of using
design and technology as a means for creating `cultural thought
experiments' or `value fictions' in which a product concept prompts
reflections about what values in the culture would make the concept
acceptable or not.

The most frustrating session that I saw at CHI was a panel called Design vs. Computing.
I expected, or at least hoped for, a stimulating discussion about
design as a unifying activity in HCI, or at least a stimulating
discussion about the role of design in HCI. What happened was a formal
debate about whether CHI should disassociate from the professional
computing community and realign itself more closely with professional
design associations. The Computing side gave a reasonable rebuttal of
the formal position in the abstract that the problem is not the
professional society in question but in determining how the field
transcends disciplinary skirmishes; however, their conduct in the
debate was narrowly focused and bordering on the schizophrenic. They
both embraced design and scoffed at it, changing its definition to suit
their purpose in the moment, all the while feeling superior because
they were the ones on the panel wearing art on their t-shirts. It may
have all been in fun; I don't know the panelists well enough to judge,
or perhaps I just take the topic too seriously to find it amusing, but
I found their attitude counter-productive. What could have been an
interesting discussion turned into a bit of blood sport aimed at
getting a cynical laugh or two from the audience, though the Design
side did a fine job of refusing to play the game.

Finally, I enjoyed the four-floor visual feast that is the
Coca Cola museum. The museum documents the soft drink's rise to fame,
including the evolution and revolution of the product, and its brand
identity, packaging and advertising. The museum included some of its
major television ad campaigns, a little trip back into nostalgia
(remember, `I like to teach the world to sing?'), as well as some of
its newer Olympics advertising. There was even a lesson about
internationalization and localization: the final tasting room included
Coca Cola's products from around the world, such as a bitter
aperitif-like drink marketed solely in Italy, and a grapefruit
concoction marketed in Japan. One flavor does not fit all, even for
Coca Cola.

Is CHI a fruitful place for visual interaction designers? I'm almost
certain that design was better represented this year than at any
previous CHI conference. A number of improvements have been made,
including the addition of design briefings and invited speakers, and
many people in the community are supportive. There were more than
enough interesting topics to choose from, at least for my interests.
However, visual interaction design is still marginalized to some
extent; the representation is largely felt through SIGs, demos, and
late-breaking presentations, all of which are quite explicitly
distinguished from the `archival quality' papers published in the
proceedings volume. SIGs are given meeting space, but no computer or
audio/visual support, a bit of an absurd situation given the subject
matter and the high level of quality usually found in visual
interaction design presentations.

Calling visual interaction design a special interest group is
itself problematic. More and more HCI researchers, practitioners, and
educators are singing the praises of multidisciplinary teams in which
each discipline, design included, brings an important set of skills and
perspectives to the table, each equally valuable. VID is not, then, a
special interest group in the same way that users of the `Amulet User
Interface Development Environment' are, or even those interested in the
domain of telemedicine. It is a core discipline in the HCI mix, and
deserves better representation at CHI.

Of course, many will point to the design briefings as the
legitimized design presence at CHI, and indeed, the preponderance of
reviewers that I can immediately identify as being from more
traditional design organizations are almost exclusively reviewers for
the design briefings. With the diversity that is the VID community,
though, I wonder if this meets everyone's needs. I would be interested
in hearing from people about their thoughts on this matter.

It has been suggested that DIS will become the design offshoot
to CHI, just as UIST focuses on development tools. This raises the
question, though: what is the role of CHI, and how do we read the
relationships among the conferences? At some point, the disciplines
need to be in the mix together, so that we have no excuse not to bump
into each other. A specialized conference is great for getting more
deeply into issues particular to a discipline, but they don't buy us
integration.

My suspicion, and, as a caveat I must say that I am an outsider
to the reviewing process and to the internal workings of CHI in
general, is that the old structure for reviewing may need some updating
to reflect both the present realities of HCI and our desires for how we
would like to promote the field in the future. Previous conference
themes have hinted at the need for better understanding and integration
`common ground, bridges between worlds, celebrating interdependence'
but I feel we are a long way from achieving this (and the design vs.
computing panel only confirms my fears).

Like cultures, each of the disciplines that have been key to
HCI have their own traditions, conceptual frameworks, bodies of
knowledge, and ideas about what constitutes valid and useful work.
Submissions should continue to be accepted based on the highest of
standards, but not necessarily by the standards of another discipline.
Many papers by visual interaction designers are rejected when judged by
the standards of cognitive or computing sciences; and I dare say many
of the technical papers would be rejected by design standards, too, and
not because the figures are less than lovely. Design-oriented papers,
and not just design briefings, might be submitted in such a way as to
ensure that they are evaluated by appropriate standards.

Submissions to CHI conferences are currently organized by forms
rather than content. For example, the categories for submission are
papers, panels, demos, design briefings, special interest groups, etc.
Other professional conferences, such as that of the Society of
Technical Communication, organize submissions based on broad content
areas of interest to their community, such as education and training,
management, visual communication, tools and technology, writing and
editing, and so on. These are all areas which are important to the
overall practice of technical communication. Likewise, CHI might
organize submissions based on broad categories of interest to the
community, allowing different forms (papers, demos, etc.) within those
categories as appropriate. This might give design equal footing in the
program, as well as address the diverse interests within the design
community. It should be noted that CHI 98 is introducing
content-specific submission categories with its education,
entertainment, and health care application domains.

I do not wish to oversimplify, or pretend I have the solution
here in suggesting tracks or submissions based on broad content areas
like Design. While focusing on forms of presentation instead of content
seems wrong to me, it also may be a way to address or avoid the
problems of categorization. If design is one track, what then are the
others? What happens to submissions which cross boundaries? I would
expect that it will get more and more difficult to make distinctions
based on current disciplinary lines. This is the hint of the real
debate in the design vs. computing panel. It is a challenging question,
but an interesting one: how to design a conference for a changing field
with competing values and visions in its very diverse audience. Sounds
like a wicked problem. Perhaps we should begin with some contextual
user research.